Zordless
by Cynder2013
Summary: Children who've marched through hell don't come out the same on the other side. (Non-canon.)


Jason didn't used to drink; now the only place where he could reliably found after five was a bar.

He watches the footage on the TV above the bar of the newest team fighting the newest threat. Is it aliens again? Jason can't remember, but he knows how it'll go. Good guys win, bad guys grow, good guys beat them back with Zords. In Jason's day a space witch threw down her staff from the moon. Nowadays it was...rain? No, that was a few years back with Tommy's newest team. Whatever it is, the results are the same.

Jason sighs and throws back the last of his beer. He debates ordering another even though he knows he's reached his self-imposed limit for the day. Drinking alone is depressing, getting drunk alone is just stupid. He can fight while slightly tipsy, he can't fight while drunk.

Not that he's supposed to fight anymore. Oh no, he's retired. He's not gonna go out in a blaze of glory. None of them are, except maybe Tommy. That guy just keeps getting new powers and losing them again. Jason isn't sure what's worse, never fighting again except for the odd legacy team up or getting called to fight at the drop of a hat. At least Tommy has moved on from Angel Grove. He's a high school principal on the other side of the state. Zack and Trini went even further. He's halfway across the country running for President and she's right next to him, taking a break from her climate change research to let America get to know the next First Lady. Jason is still here with the same job teaching martial arts and self-defence at the youth center that he had back in high school.

Billy is here too, doing research and teaching in chemistry and engineering at the new UC Angel Grove campus. The years of repairing and refining alien technology gave him a major leg up on Earth-bound scientists. He could have gotten a job at any university in the world but he came back to Angel Grove as soon as he got his second PhD. Jason understood why. Something about spending their formative years saving the world made them nervous about leaving their home base behind. That was why Kimberly had come back too, after her gymnastics career was over. She'd gotten a job leading tours in the desert, keeping people far away from the ruins of the Command Center. She's had that job for ten years and loved every minute of it, until the morning she'd collapsed just as her first tour group left town. The bleeding in her brain couldn't be stopped. Now Kimberly would never leave Angel Grove again. She and Jason had been married for five years.

"Hey, Jason." Jason turns around and sees Billy waving at him from across the room. Billy knows better than to come up to him when his back is turned. Everyone who's been in Angel Grove for more than a day knows not to sneak up on either of them.

Billy takes a seat next to Jason and nods towards the TV. "That's live. I figured if the world ends today..." He doesn't finish the sentence but Jason nods. There's no one in town he'd rather die with either.

They watch the battle in silence. Billy's fingers twitch, from too much coffee or the ache to feel the controls of his Zord beneath them Jason doesn't know. Jason tightens his grip on his empty glass. His fingers are twitching too.

"Do you miss it?" Jason asks, breaking the silence.

"Like hell." Billy scoffs. "And it was hell, wasn't it? But it was ours."

Jason nods. "I keep thinking that that's how I'm gonna die." He looks at the TV where a giant Zord is punching a giant monster. "Then I remember that we're done, we're not kids anymore."

And whose idea was it to give kids a hell to play in and then lock them out when they were too old? When you knew that monsters were real and you used to be able to fight them learning to think of the world as anything but a battlefield was next to impossible.

"I want to meet them," Billy says. "The new teams. I met Tommy's kids once, after they lost their's." Meaning after they lost their Ranger powers and became teenagers trying to go back to being normal.

Jason snorts. "What are you gonna do, start a support group?" He means it as a joke, but it actually sounds like a good idea. Only a former Power Ranger could know what it's like to be a former Power Ranger. Why shouldn't they start a support group?

Billy shakes his head. "No, I...I just want to talk to them, you know? Tell them..." His eyes drift towards the battle playing out on the television. It's the third monster for these kids, maybe the fourth. "Tell them to get out while they still can."

Jason doesn't say anything. They watch the battle. It ends just the way Jason expects.


End file.
